The Duke Read online

  “Will that be all, Your Grace?”

  He waved her away and snapped open the seal on the letter, glancing up to watch the girl’s uneven progress toward the front of the house. These women were doing their best with the slimmest resources. He could only marvel at their tenacity and resilience.

  Still, they would be the death of him.

  In two years he had never so much longed for the cigar smoke-filled masculine retreat of the Theia’s wardroom, where his officers drank brandy and on occasion traded ribald stories. They had always halted those stories the moment he entered the room. A captain was master of his officers, never one of them.

  His days on the Fairway, when he had still been one of the lads clamping his lips shut as his captain strolled into the wardroom, hiding laughter behind discipline, were some of his finest memories. His happiest.

  He wondered if Pike smoked cigars, or whether the footman’s breeches and coat she preferred were the limit of her tolerance for the male sex. Probably. Of all the residents of Kallin, Pike had come from the worst circumstance: abused daily, and at least two pregnancies ended by her rapacious master’s fist to her belly. Small wonder she would rather break her own bones keeping the house habitable than allow a man near the place.

  But she had survived. Through her own intelligence and ingenuity—and Torquil Sterling’s network of accomplices in the West Indies, England, and Scotland—she had escaped and somehow reached Leith.

  He ran his palm over his face and focused on Mary Tarry’s writing. It was like the writer herself: firm, strong, competent. Wise and thoroughly no-nonsense, the daughter of Kallin’s old butler and housekeeper had been Gabriel’s first choice as keeper of the Solstice Inn. He had barely begun to explain what he needed when she accepted. Within six months she had restored the inn on the east-west road at the base of Glen Irvine, making it a welcome retreat for weary travelers and a moneymaker.

  Every one of the women in Glen Village was loyal to her, and therefore to him.

  Your Grace,

  A young Englishwoman, Anne Foster, has come to the village—to stay, it seems. I’ve given her work at the tea shop. She sleeps at the Solstice. She has not asked for sanctuary, and seems content sitting in the corner of the kitchen writing in a notebook.

  Perhaps this Anne Foster had extra ink. Or a pencil, for that matter.

  She is asking questions about you—both of you and the Devil’s Duke. I’ve told her you are not in residence. Still, she means to walk up the glen to have a glimpse of the house.

  M.T.

  He tossed the note atop the grate. If Mrs. Tarry had any idea how many people regularly poked about his properties, from Haiknayes to his ships berthed at Leith, she would not bother writing to him about one traveler’s curiosity.

  If this Anne Foster had not asked for sanctuary and was not wearing the Haiknayes star—the badge Tor had insisted would help identify women seeking sanctuary—she had no need of Kallin. He wasn’t worried. The little community at Kallin and in Glen Village had managed to hide its purpose for more than two years already. One lone female would not unmask the Devil’s Duke.

  As he closed the ledger that Cassandra Finn carefully kept, the sun was dipping toward the hills across the river. He had time to begin the roof repairs.

  Or chop wood.

  Out in the cold he blew frosted air, bound his tartan more firmly around his neck, and hefted the axe. Logs from an ancient evergreen lay about the yard. From within the stable, the sound of an ox’s snort came softly into the dusk. The river, gurgling on its way to the rapids farther downstream, was the only other sound. Even the dogs Pike kept to frighten away fox had retreated inside to warm themselves by the fire.

  The stillness was sublime, like the mizzen watch on a winter night on the Sargasso—only without the creaking rigging and his bosun’s snores emanating from belowdecks like a foghorn.

  Nearby a rooster offered a pathetic crow.

  “Poor bastard,” he mumbled. “If you were a hen, they’d have use for you. But your days are numbered, laddie. Shame you canna chop wood an’ repair a roof.”

  Now he was talking to chickens. Somewhere up there in the heavens, that rogue Torquil was splitting his sides laughing.

  Smiling, Gabriel hauled a log onto the chopping block and brought the axe down.

  Snow came overnight. After meeting with Kallin’s Master Blender, Gabriel tugged a wide-brimmed hat over his brow, gathered tools, and climbed to the roof. Setting his boots firmly at the apex, he surveyed his domain.

  The world glittered brilliantly: golden sun, azure sky, silver river, milky fields, and forests of the darkest fir stretching up the hills on either flank of the glen and tipped with snow. On the Irvine’s opposite bank, a dozen deer stood out against the white, unworried about predators in this frozen paradise.

  Days, weeks, months had passed in the past two years during which he had wished his father still alive, even his wretched brother, and himself standing beneath full sails on a cresting sea. But this—this heaven on earth—he could not be unhappy that this was his.

  Kallin needed money. The insurance from the Edinburgh house inferno would help. The fine malt aging in the long shed would eventually secure the estate’s prosperity. In the meantime, the women were indeed making do. In Portsmouth, Xavier was seeing to investments. All was well.

  Gabriel drew a tunnel of frigid air into his lungs and released it slowly. For the first time since he had left the sea behind, he was content.

  The temperature had risen since dawn and water ran in rivulets all down the myriad sloping roofs of the house. He pulled a tool from his belt and pried the offending tiles loose.

  He was hammering a nail into a chipped tile when an uncomfortable tingle skittered up the back of his neck. Damn wood chopping. Setting the hammer down and reaching up to rub at the complaining muscles, he turned his head and saw her.

  Everything—running water, crackling snow, his heartbeats—halted.

  It was not every day that a man saw a dream materialize before him. In Gabriel’s experience, it had only happened on one other day in his life.

  This time, like a faery out of ancient legend she stood on the hillside in snow up to her ankles, skirts whipping in the wind, hood thrown back to let loose wild tresses of mingled sunshine and fire.

  He almost fell off the roof.

  Grabbing the first thing that his hand hit, he gripped tight and dug his heels into broken slate.

  Here she was. On his land. She. Not a trick of the light on gleaming snow. Not another woman of similar appearance to mistake for her at this distance, as he had done time and again in five years.

  But she.

  An English girl has come to the village . . . she is asking questions.

  Anne Foster. Anne: her sister Emily’s second name. Foster: her mother’s family name.

  A false name. Hiding in plain sight. From him? Who else could she possibly know in this remote corner of the world? This simply could not be an accidental trespassing.

  Of all the curious spectators to his life, never in a thousand years had he expected to see Amarantha Vale here—or on any property he owned.

  Below, Pike’s dogs catapulted out of the house, vaulted over the fences, and flew across the field, barking madly and tearing up the hill straight for her.

  He did not call off the dogs. Believed by Britons from Edinburgh to London to be a diabolical abductor of helpless maidens, and satisfied enough to be acknowledged as such, he considered the useful effects that a quartet of slavering, ebony whelps running breakneck across the slope would have on the delicate sensibilities of an Englishwoman. Also, of course, there would be the effects of the stories she would subsequently tell of this harrowing encounter, which were bound to be taken up by gossips and ensure his continued privacy and the privacy of the residents of Glen Irvine. It had been months since mention of the Devil’s Duke had appeared in any paper. Fresh rumors would serve him well.

  He failed, however, to co
nsider the peculiarities of this particular Englishwoman: she was neither a maiden, which he had learned in the most painful manner possible, nor helpless, which he had learned without suffering any pain whatsoever—rather the opposite.

  She remained still as the dogs greeted her like long-lost friends. Gathering about her with joyful leaps, sniffing her outstretched crimson mittens and wagging their tails, the turncoats showed themselves no more immune to her natural allure than Gabriel had been five years earlier.

  At that time, however, he had not yet become the Devil’s Duke. And the Devil had a reputation to uphold.

  Lifting his fingers to his mouth, he let fly a whistle that could be heard above cannon roar; it pierced the wintery wind and reached the dogs’ ears. As one, they broke from her and careened back across the snowy valley toward the house.

  She shouted into the wind. He saw her throat stretch, her hand swipe the tresses from before her face, and her lips move—lips about which he had dreamed many frustrated dreams. But he heard nothing; the wind was far too strong.

  This was idiocy, remaining here staring across the hillside, without moving. But concern for those in his protection and an equally powerful instinct for self-preservation prevented him from acknowledging her now. With the sun at his back, the brim of the hat shaded his face. She could have no idea that the master of Kallin, the duke himself, was playing handyman on the roof of his house.

  She shouted again.

  “Mary Tarry believes you are an urisk!” came to him over the frosty slope, barely audible and swiftly whisked away by the wind. Still it was her voice, the voice he had dreamed about like he had dreamed about her lips: vividly, repeatedly, for too many months before he had finally wiped the memory of her from his senses. Unsuccessfully. Invariably the memory of her returned whenever he was very tired, very drunk, or—damnably—very angry.

  Now he did not reply. What could he reply? That if urisks had hearts that pounded like kettledrums, then certainly at this moment he might be one of those solitary, curmudgeonly creatures of legend.

  Anyway, if he shouted the sound would not reach her; he was downwind. Fortunate, although not accidental. Centuries earlier the house had been situated with attention to the patterns of wind through the glen, to give its inhabitants ample warning of invaders approaching over the hills without giving the invaders the opposite courtesy. Thank God for his ancestors’ strategic wisdom.

  She remained with her hands at her sides, cloak billowing, and he thought—he knew—that this was simply another punishment for having misspent his youth so vilely. It seemed he would never be finished atoning.

  Then she laughed.

  Intoxicating laughter.

  He must end this now. This was not, after all, a suitable time to make good on the agreement he had made aboard his ship in the midst of a storm: his pact with the devil.

  That pact had seemed a wise choice in the moment. Seeing her now, here, however, it was eminently clear to Gabriel that the particular terms of that deal had been very poorly chosen.

  Judas, his chest hurt.

  Turning his back to the hillside, he took up the hammer, reaffixed the slate in its rightful spot, and drove a nail into the peg attachment. Another nail followed—unnecessarily—and yet another, until the thing was so well fixed in place that not even a tornado would wrest it free. Then he did the same with another tile. And another. And another.

  For the next hour he did not so much as tilt his head to either side.

  By the time he stuffed the tools back into his belt and finally allowed himself a quick glance at the hill, there was nothing there but snow and a lone black stream running from a crevice in the hill downward.

  Excellent. Excellent.

  He climbed down the ladder and into the dry warmth of the house and took the stairs to the ground floor two at a time. In the drawing room the dogs picked themselves up from before the hearth and circled him.

  “Disloyal mongrels,” he muttered.

  An ancient chamber that had not been updated since his grandfather’s time, it boasted comfortable furniture, thick tapestries, and a few paintings of former lairds of Kallin, each whiskered duke wrapped in tartan and bearing arms. Here and there were hints of the house’s current residents: a book of poetry on a side table, a shawl draped over a chair, a sewing bag tucked into the corner of the sofa, and a cat lolling on a cushion.

  He bent down and snapped open the door to the sideboard.

  The cabinet was empty. Entirely empty. No brandy. No whiskey. Not even any gin.

  “May I assist Your Grace?” Pike said from the doorway.

  “No.”

  In the top cabinet his mother had kept vases. Desperate, he opened it anyway. Bottles gleamed within. He grabbed the cognac.

  “Rebecca’s little one, Clementine, has started to crawl,” his footman said, apparently apropos of nothing.

  “Did anyone call at the house while I was up on the roof?”

  “A red-haired stranger stood on the south hill for a bit. But she left without coming to the house. The gates around the pastures are always locked, as is the gate at the wall. Shall I inquire after her at the vill—”

  “No. No stranger may come into this house or the yard or anywhere near. As per my usual order.” He peered down at his toes and then at the empty bottom cabinet.

  Rebecca’s little one has started to crawl.

  He swallowed the remainder of the spirits. He was colossally unfit to be the guardian of a group of young women and infants. He needed to return to Leith as soon as possible. Or London. Or Bristol. Dover. Anywhere but here. Find investors, potential partners. Let this odd little family trundle along with their overlord at a safe distance of eighty or two hundred miles away.

  But first, he must get rid of a curious Englishwoman.

  That old swell of infuriated pride was overtaking him, followed swiftly by the old familiar pain. He welcomed neither.

  Mary Tarry seemed to have no idea that the new arrival was the daughter of a nobleman. Which meant that if he contacted her family and invited them to Kallin, she would have no choice but to reveal herself. But he could not invite anyone to Kallin without risking all, especially not the sort of gay socialites he understood the Earl and Countess of Vale to be.

  Her elder sister, Emily, was another sort of woman altogether, a bluestocking who lived alone in London. How would she respond to the news that her sister was living under a false name in a Scottish village?

  He would write to Emily Vale—anonymously—and bid her come fetch her sister.

  Filling the glass anew, he threw back the dram. But no quantity of spirits could erase the images he conjured now—not of a pretty girl whose plentiful freckles and snapping eyes and unguarded tongue had entranced him. Rather, the image of the horror that his words had inspired the night he discovered she had married.

  He could not see her again. Ever.

  Best to leave the past in the past, where she belonged.

  Amarantha supposed that could have gone worse. The dogs could have actually attacked her.

  Walking alongside the river back toward the village, boots sodden and nose numb, she watched her breaths plume in little clouds and stuffed her hands more deeply into her pockets. Even bathed in brilliant sunlight this northern land was chilly—

  This land of hills and rivers so glorious they stole the frigid air from her lungs and made her dizzy.

  This land of people so kind that she, a lone woman, had found welcome in every place she had sought rest.

  This land in which her motherless nephew was welcomed into another family’s home as though he were one of their own.

  This land of breathtaking beauty and generosity.

  This land in which her quarry was impossible to run to ground.

  She had thought it was he on the roof. His shoulders, the very manner in which he moved, even the way he raised the hammer—the man on the roof had seemed so familiar—as though he were the man she had watched so closely, so
hungrily, in that other time and place far from this reality.

  Apparently not.

  Or the man on the roof was in fact the Duke of Loch Irvine, and he did not recognize her.

  She did not know which prospect disconcerted her more: that she had traveled so far to find the duke, only to be told in the village he was not in residence at the castle and, when she made the two-mile walk in the snow anyway, to be met with locked gates and dogs; or that the man she had once been in love with did not remember her after only five years. Both were maddening.

  The people of Glen Village must know something of their overlord, even if they seemed reticent to speak of him. She would remain in the village and continue to ask questions until someone answered them. The Solstice Inn was wonderfully warm and comfortable, and the trade Mary Tarry had made with her was ideal: work at the tea shop for a cot at the top of the house and a corner of the kitchen when she was not working.

  And she was weary. Weary of the journey. Weary of making friends only to swiftly lose them. Weary of being alone.

  The river to her right, sparkling in the setting sun, rippled and bubbled comfortingly. Along the narrow road layered with snow, the stark trunks of birches and dark evergreen boughs and the tiny streams rushing down the hillside toward the river spoke to her of elves and faeries, of trolls and all the other creatures that had populated her childhood: her fondest friends besides Emily.

  Now thanks to Mary Tarry she knew of another creature: the Scottish urisk.

  Paul had told her that fantastical creatures had no place in a woman’s imagination. Imagination had no place in a woman. Only virtue.

  She wondered if the man on the roof believed in urisks, or if he had simply thought her a madwoman, standing on that hill, shouting into the wind.

  Smiling, she tucked her hood more closely about her face and her steps were so light that her feet barely made marks in the snow.